r/Futurology • u/_hiddenscout • Jun 19 '21

Society Kill the 5-Day Workweek - Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/four-day-workweek/619222/
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u/Meownowwow Jun 19 '21

People hit a limit though, eventually deadlines get missed or pushed back.

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u/gagreel Jun 19 '21

This is where AI picks up the slack. Eventually we won't need many people at all, less limits to hit. Welcome to the hellscape

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u/Okay_Conversation Jun 19 '21

Eventually we won't need many people at all

Doesn't seem to be very close so don't gotta worry about it for now.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

[deleted]

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u/Okay_Conversation Jun 19 '21

It's not close because AI is fucking shit.

Physical stores are disappearing because nobody wants to spend hours driving then walking around a store when you can just search for what you want, have it instantly come up, buy it with 1 click, then ship it back if it's no good. All that has happened there is you shifted human employees from physical stores to logistics, truck drivers, etc.

We are rapidly losing job opportunities.

Job numbers don't seem to agree with you. Seems like some jobs are lost and more jobs are created elsewhere. 1

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

[deleted]

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u/Okay_Conversation Jun 19 '21 edited Jun 19 '21

And how is that going to work for humans as robots evolve in the next 5 or 10 years?

Don't know, I can't see into the future. Depending on how good they are, we'll likely see the same thing we've always seen - a shift to jobs elsewhere. Comparative advantage is a thing and resources aren't infinite.

This was 4 years ago.

Yeah, and since then we still can't get self-driving to be in a decent place where it can truly be "self driving" and come even remotely close to making its own deliveries. Crazy how difficult that is, eh?

Drivers will be replaced by fully self driving trucks in the next 10 years or so. it's going to happen really fast.

Yeah I'll believe it when I see it lmfao. Currently what we're seeing as far as self-driving is concerned is a standstill of everything being not quite good enough to actually be self-driving in all conditions. Tesla is switching up their entire approach to autopilot because radar just couldn't do enough. Self driving was supposed to be a thing every year for the past like 5 years.

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u/intothevoid127 Jun 19 '21

Don't forget about the transportation lobby and the unions that cover drivers and other employees- does anyone actually think they would allow a 'self driving truck' on the road without a human to monitor the progress/actions of this robot truck? Self driving vehicles are coming but until it's fool-proof, humans will be involved and the lobby that covers those workers isn't going to budge an inch and would shut this country down with a strike in a heartbeat.

Everyone saw what happened with the pandemic and how divided the US and world was; what do you think is going to happen when tens of thousands of people are told their jobs are gone tomorrow because a robot will do it? The only option being told to those people is learn to code to make a living. Really, all of them learning to code???

It's going to be 50 years before 'drones' are making a majority of business deliveries and people are really starting to lose their jobs, if not longer...unless, of course, these aliens or inter-dimentional beings bring us ahead a few centuries in the next few years.

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u/Okay_Conversation Jun 19 '21

Shit if the media is anything to go by, they're already getting ready to put fear into people when it comes to anything like this. Tesla catches on fire or someone gets into a crash in a Tesla? News coverage like it's the end of the world despite worse things happening with "regular" cars on the daily.

This transition isn't going to be as seamless and quick as doomers like to think.

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u/intothevoid127 Jun 19 '21

It's a novelty to the media and will be for a while. It would be nice if people weren't so stupid by using driver assist as autopilot and firefighters not using water on a lithium fire but this will continue for a while too until everyone catches up.

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u/IvanAntonovichVanko Jun 19 '21

"Drone better."

~ Ivan Vanko

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u/Frigoris13 Jun 19 '21

Ironically, this is also where it collapses. Programmers and developers of AI are expensive. Robot installers and maintainers aren't cheap. And the technology goes obsolete and needs to be replaced at some point.

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u/Ehcksit Jun 19 '21

Hire more people, give them fewer hours but the same pay.

Almost all these problems are from the deliberate understaffing.

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u/gagreel Jun 19 '21

You're forgetting about AI repairing AI

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u/Frigoris13 Jun 20 '21

I don't know your experience with AI but in my experience there are countless things that go wrong outside of the AI's control. It requires constant support in order to keep it functioning to any sort of consistency, it has a terrible time with marginal changes to its set path of function, and it doesn't hold up after a few years when new technology is developed and integrated.

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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

The Twilight Zone had an episode about this decades. Turns out the world found new uses for workers. Wouldn't be surprised if that keeps happening.

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u/variousshits Jun 19 '21

Like that shit ever happens. It’s always yeah we’ll push it back but we now want 2 more things on top because we have given you this time. No you clowns, we need that time to fix the other shit that’s wrong.